


Stories

by OnyxSardonyx



Series: Keep Going [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Eating Disorders, Gen, I'm Sorry, Nonsupernatural AU, Past Child Abuse, Self Harm, Suicide Attempt, it's not pretty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 20:28:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/917698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnyxSardonyx/pseuds/OnyxSardonyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life stories of Lucifer's ward mates in Going Through Hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Alastair

I grew up in a very religious town in a very religious family. Church every Sunday, prayers before meals, the whole drill. I had Sunday school and Youth groups; the church, and God, were a constant part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I was four when our pastor first - well... touched me. And when I say touched, I mean exactly what you think I mean. I was a child and I thought it was my duty, just like carrying candles in the mass or reading from the bible in Sunday school. Yes, it was more painful and I was told to tell nobody about it. But it also made me the pastor's favourite; I got to do everything first and I got special favours.

It went on for years and years. I was sexually abused on a weekly basis - sometimes even more - from the age of four until I was fifteen. I was told it was God's will. I was taught to keep quiet, not to tell anyone, and to keep the bruises and pains even from my own family.

When I was fifteen, our family moved because my father got a promotion. For the first time, I was free from my pastor's sexual assaults and let me tell you, I missed it. I went to church in our new town, of course, but I was only an ordinary boy, I didn't get any favours, I wasn't abused, I wasn't special.

At some point around that time it occurred me how utterly wrong this was. Maybe because some other pastor in some other church had been found out of abusing children or maybe because things like that became more of an issue in the media. I realised I was a victim, not a favourite. I was fifteen. Can you imagine? Taking more than ten years to figure out that it's not right for an old man to fuck a child in the ass in exchange for a few favours. But I just thought that's how things were, I thought it was the will of God.

I thought, but if it's bad, how can it be the will of God? All my life, I'd been taught that God was good, that He forgave our sins and that He would treat us good if we heeded to His rules. So at fifteen, I began to wonder. How could God let a holy man, a man in His service, abuse an innocent child and pass it off as God's will? It must be the highest blasphemy there is; why hadn't God struck him with lightning and smote him off the Earth?

So I began to doubt God. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but let me tell you, if you've lived fifteen years with the certainty that God is watching over you, it's a big deal. The second I started doubting Him, I felt He was no longer watching over me. I felt He had deserted me not because I doubted Him, but because He simply didn't care about me at all. After all, if he did care, he would never let something like this happen to me, right?

And it was at that point that I first started having thoughts of suicide. At fifteen, I was young and didn't know how. I slit my wrists and didn't bleed to death because I'd done it wrong. That was the first time I went into therapy. The only thing therapy did to me was make me even more desperate to leave this life behind. I got out, I tried to hang myself, my parents found me seconds before I jumped off the chair. It happened over and over and over again. My suicide attempts have always failed, every time there's been someone to drag me back into therapy. Every time on the psych ward, it's just an endless wait to be let out. Every time I'm let out, I try again. Therapy is no use. How could ordinary people make things right again? I'm telling you, they can't. I've stopped caring about anyone a long time ago. My parents let this happen; God let this happen; nobody ever cared enough about me to truly save me. Everyone simply keeps me from dying and then gives me away, gets me out of their care, so therapists can try again. They have to force-feed me in here. I haven't willingly eaten anything in years. I don't want to live. I don't see the point.

Dying would be so much easier; and if I do get into Heaven, the first thing I'll do is tell God how much of an ass He is and how little He's ever done for me.

But I likely won't get into Heaven anyway. If such a thing even exists.

 


	2. Ruby

I grew up in a ... well. Dysfunctional is probably not the right word. But when I grew up, my parents were never there. They were both working and from the age of, like, five, I had to take care of myself. If I was lucky we would have dinner together once or twice a week. They barely ever had a day off. I learned later that the reason why they both had to work two jobs even though we were a small family living in a small flat in a small town was because my father had gambling debts, lots of them, and they needed to pay them off if they wanted to keep the situation from getting worse. So in a way, I paid the price for my father's gambling.

But maybe that's unfair. Maybe he should be praised for trying to get back on track, trying to get his life under control again. I think my mother helped him a lot with that. And... well, babies just happen sometimes. I know I wasn't planned and I know my mother considered an abortion for a long time. Either way, I was pretty neglected as a child. Plus side, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted. But it also meant that I started getting difficult from when I started primary school.

It was just small rebellious acts at first. Things where I thought, if I do this, they have got to notice me. That was pretty much my motivation for any of the things I did, even later. But at first, it was little things. I was loud and rude and annoying in class, I didn't do my homework, I skipped school. It didn't work. My teachers phoned my parents. Their reaction was simply, 'Stop being so stupid, Ruby'. They never sat me down and talked to me about why I did it or what they or I or anyone could do to avoid it from happening again. They simply said, 'Don't do it.' And went back to work like everything was fine.

At some point when I was - eleven, I think - I started cutting. For attention. Cutting in places where people can't help but notice; my wrists mostly. I never tried to hide. I didn't want to hide. I wanted people to notice and I wanted people to care and to wonder why an eleven year old child felt compelled to injure herself.

I don't even think my parents noticed.

Some of my teachers in school noticed, though, and one of them - my English teacher - made me stay after class and asked me why I cut. I didn't tell her the truth, but I let her take care of me for a while.

It didn't last long, though, because I got into middle school after that. Nobody knew me and everybody just assumed that the scars on my wrists just were. No teacher questioned it, some of my classmates mocked me, but nobody thought to ask why.

So I tried to stop. The mocking was getting uncomfortable and the cuts hurt and the reaction I'd hoped to receive hadn't happened, so I tried to stop and realised I couldn't. I would go two, maybe three days without cutting and then have a breakdown and start cutting again.

It never occurred to me to actively go out and get help. I waited for help to come to me.

It went like that for a long, long time. Until a few weeks ago, when my parents actually did notice. They accused me of being an attention seeker and they said I was ungrateful. It left me absolutely devastated.

So I ran away. Everywhere would have to be better than this, I thought at the time. I was pretty stupid.

So I was out on the streets. I'd always be a loner at school so I had no friends to go to. I was just adrift, on the streets, with no job, no money, no food and no idea how to get any of these things.

I think I lasted three days. After that, I realised it was worse. But I didn't want to go back, so I took the next step. I'd thought of attempting suicide before, thinking that if I got desperate enough, my parents were sure to notice me and care for me - but I never actually did it. But after living on the streets for a few days I thought there was no place I could go except down.

And I went down. Down a bridge, actually. It was painful and it took longer than I thought. But I blacked out eventually.

And woke up in hospital.

They told me that I was lucky to be alive and I just scoffed at them. Lucky indeed. Apparently, I had been dead for a few minutes, like really, properly dead, but someone noticed me and pulled me out of the water and saved me.

I still don't know who that someone was. I don't think I want to know.

So anyway, I was in hospital and the most amazing thing happened. My parents actually came and visited me and told me how sorry they were and that they screwed up things and that they would try to be there for me more in the future. They cried and apologised and they really, really cared, for the first time in my life I actually felt like I mattered to them.

That wasn't the only thing that was good about hospital. See, there was this girl in my room. Her name was Bela. She was in because she'd had a fight with a dog. She looked nasty, she didn't really want to talk about it but it must have been a big dog. A vicious thing. She looked scarred for life and she had therapists working with her because of the trauma. But she was lovely otherwise, very lively and enigmatic and she didn't really understand how anyone would want to end their own life. We didn't get along at first, but I liked her. We ended up talking about all sorts of stuff and we were friends a few days later. And when I say I liked her, well -

But I was transferred to the psych ward shortly afterwards. I didn't understand how my parents could abandon me like that. In my mind, it was abandonment - they simply gave me away rather than taking care of me themselves. By the time I was transferred, I had a much more optimistic outlook on life, not just because of my parents, but also because of Bela. Coming here really destroyed that.

But I don't want to die anymore. I just want to get out and find Bela. Not because I'm interested in her but because she's the first real friend I've ever had.


	3. Lilith

I would say, overall, that I had a good life. I did! At least for the first couple of years. My parents were wonderful people and they gave us everything. The happiest moment of my life was when my little brother Benny was born. I was five at the time and I'd been wishing for a little brother or sister and then I got one! I loved him to death, I really did. He was wonderful, he really was.

But of course it couldn't stay perfect. It's like, whenever you have something that works and makes you happy fate decides that your happiness isn't pleasing anymore and does some outrageous fucked up thing to take it away. And that's what happened. Benny was my happiness and my happiness was taken away.

I was fifteen.

You see, Benny's school was on the way home from my school so I made a habit of picking him up if I finished school around the same time as him. Even when he was old enough to go home on his own I still did it because it just felt nice and he never complained. At least not very much. (I mean, if you're ten years old and your older sister smothers you in hugs and kisses, of course you're going to be a bit embarrassed, right? But he never told me to stop picking him up, so I never did.)

But that day I didn't pick him up because I wanted to stay after school with some of my friends. We were going to go shopping and stuff, I don't even really remember what we did. But when I came home, Benny wasn't there. He hadn't made it home from school.

I still blame myself for it. I thought (and still think), if only I hadn't been so selfish and stayed with my friends, if I'd picked him up as usual - then maybe I could have protected him and he would still be with us.

I don't want to go into this very much. I don't like to think about how it affected me and how it tore our family apart. A body was found months later, already too decayed for the doctors to tell what had been done to him. But DNA tests confirmed with a relative certainty that this decaying little body had been my Benny, that he was really dead and I was never going to get him back again.

His death will forever be on my shoulders, no matter how many times my parents, my doctors or my therapists tell me it wasn't my fault.

Some people say that not knowing what happened is the worst. I used to think so, back before he was found. I used to think, _I wish I knew what happened_. The uncertainty drove me mad. I used to imagine all sorts of scenarios. I used to hope, I used to have dreams about him coming home after a long and horrible ordeal and me taking him into my arms and soothing him and making everything all right again.

The uncertainty isn't worse, because it still allows you to have hope.

But I know he's dead and let me tell you, there is nothing that is worse. Especially since a good amount of uncertainty came with his death. What had he suffered in his last days? Had he been held captive, abused, raped, beaten, tortured -?

Okay, I think I already mentioned that it tore our family apart. And I mean that. My parents divorced less than a year after Benny had been found. My dad was crying constantly for weeks. My mum was silent, apathetic, couldn't even do her job anymore. They split up, they didn't have time or energy to expend on looking after me.

As for me, well - as you can imagine, I wasn't dealing very well. In fact, I wasn't dealing at all. I stopped going to school and I started to cut. I started bingeing and throwing up after meals. I started thinking about ending my own life.

And I tried, back when I was seventeen. I didn't know much about suicide back then, so I just did the first thing that came to mind (short of guns, which I didn't have access to). I slit my wrists. And didn't die because a shallow, horizontal cut on your wrist won't do much to you. I got scared, though, and when I realised I wasn't going to die I played it down. I told my mum I'd fallen while doing sports (I was into Hockey at the time) and she accepted it without question.

I never even thought about therapy. Well, yes, I did think about it. A lot. But I never thought about submitting myself because I didn't want the help. Sure, I was going through hell, but I just thought I needed to keep going; worse than that, I thought I deserved it.

After my initial suicide attempt, I thought about therapy more. I read up about mental disorders and found books aimed at people with eating disorder and self-harm issues. I attempted treating myself. I attempted getting better, mostly because at some point I thought, _Benny wouldn't have wanted this for me_.

So I got sort of stable. I got off the bulimia, at least. I still cut, but less frequently. I finished school, applied for college, and moved out.

It went well for a while. But something happened - or nothing at all - and it all came back. The nightmares, the bulimia, the suicidal thoughts.

So I began stocking up pills. And took them when it all got too much. My roommate found me in the middle of empty packages; I think she knew for a while that something was up, but never pressured me to tell her anything - but she called 911 immediately and saved me. I was in hospital for a while, got my stomach pumped, got told I was lucky, and was transferred to psych ward.


End file.
